


Chasing serendipity

by Finnie



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 16:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12891951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Finnie/pseuds/Finnie
Summary: And jack waited.





	Chasing serendipity

day zero

  
(or, the sordid details on how captain jack harkness awoke immortal)

  
there are no words to describe a feeling of waking up knowing that you're not quite human anymore.

  
jack flinches awake, and he's lying on what looks like a battlefield, scattered with broken bits of dalek and sizzling chunks of metal. amongst them, there lay cooling corpses, pale and untouched, still looking as if they're asleep.

  
there's not an explanation to why he's still alive, because daleks leave no survivors. he sits up, touches his chest where he had been hit, and knows. perhaps he's known from the beginning, perhaps he's always known. people always know when they lose their deaths. it's a physical thing, torn out by time.   
time takes and time gives and time leaves.

off in the distance, he hears the whooshing of a tardis taking off. he runs, trips over a carcass, keeps runing, but it disappears in front of his eyes. perhaps he imagines it, but he thinks that he can hear the doctor and rose laughing, imagines them not even turning back to look for him. perhaps they thought him dead, but in the end he thinks that they must've known, or at least the doctor did, just like he had.

  
he blinks in confusion as he processes his newfound eternity, and then sinks to the floor.

  
if there are words for that feeling, he'll have all the time in the world to find them.

  
.

  
day one

  
(or, the consequences)

  
there are lots of things jack isn't: honest, fair, loyal. but he thinks that in the past few months he must've deserved not to be called a coward any longer, that at least some of those things must've been good. in the end, he thinks, it must take a lot of bravery to stare a dalek in the face and keep shooting. keep shooting, that's what jack's good at. but he doesn't think that the doctor would call it brave. he doesn't think that the doctor would call anything warlike brave at all.

  
his life up to now is all a blur of half-remembered opportunities and people he's missed out on: he's betrayed his little brother, he's left john, he's had years of his life erased and he's done who-knows-what to deserve it. there's something about a life that's consisted of empty blotches, and that's that you don't have much to lose. but he's pretty sure that these months of knocking about with the doctor had given him some semblance of purpose.

despite jack's tendency to leave people sooner than he gets to know them, something about the doctor infuriatingly makes you want to stay. in the end, jack stayed long enough to get shot down, and this is his reward, he thinks bitterly, left alone with the dead.

  
(the doctor's not really to blame, he thinks when he cools off. the doctor can't possibly know everything in the universe, it's just what everybody else makes of him.)

  
jack sits down into the soot and waits.  
he wonders if this is what his lovers feel like in the morning.

  
.

  
day two

  
(or, the sorrows and woes of the left behind)

  
he lies on his back, stares at the stubbornly flickering neon lights on the ceiling. it's been a while, and the station has begun to stench of bodies. he wonders if someone's going to find him, or if this is what he's condemned to: an eternity amongst the rotting. he's not sure he can starve, not sure he could make a way out either.

  
all those things he was a little proud of, they seem foolish now. perhaps he was never a better person at all. perhaps all those are just lingering side-effects of the doctor's goodness.

  
gosh. gosh. he wants to go home, but he doesn't really have one to go to. his ship that's never really been his had been abandoned as soon as he hopped into the tardis. he'd been hopeful, foolishly stuck on the idea that if he smiles enough and fights good enough, the doctor would let him stay. it was a vain hope, but a nice one, that jack harkness could find a place to belong to, get used to this new and foreign purpose, bewitch this strange alien god.

  
he waits still. if he waits still enough, perhaps the doctor will come back for him.

  
.

  
day forty-four

  
(or, a way out)

  
after long weeks of tearing apart every bit of tech on the station, rewiring everything through his wrecked and useless vortex manipulator, dying and startling back to life gasping for breath and an awful lot of futile waiting, one day everything glows back to life and carries him far, far away from that station.

  
jack finds the earth, and he waits.

  
.  
day three hundred and seventy-eight

  
(or, all the days the doctor keeps on not coming)

  
jack makes it out of solitary confinement, somehow drags himself to his feet, finds a decent change of clothes and travels to cardiff, the only place in the universe you can wait for the doctor. he acquires an office (through a series of actions the doctor would not approve of) and finds that his vortex manipulator is indeed fried to the point of uselesness. he stil straps it to his arm, as more or less of a reminder. what of, he's not that sure.

  
that there's still someone out there he's waiting for. someone who might be looking for him. someone who might have once looked for him. will have looked. it's a complicated thing, the future that never could be.

  
perhaps just to have something to cling to.  
he hangs his gun on the wall, sprawls into a chair, and he waits.

  
.

  
day two thousand five hundred and fifty-five

  
(or, the days of captain jack harkness are a wonderful little impasse)

  
he wants out. he's not a thing of the past, jack. everything around seems washed out, slow, crawling through jello. so he does what he does best, cheats and gambles and meets people at bars. he floats through years timeless, and remembers only the scent of his lovers' colognes.

days pass and they give nothing, and he waits. there's only a vague sensation of an aim. one day, perhaps, the doctor will come, and maybe if jack smiles enough and fights good enough he'll let him stay.

  
.

  
day sixteen thousand two hundred and ninety-seven

  
(or, the day jack harkness became a hero, or something of the sort)

  
it was meant to be a one-time thing. he stumbles upon a small and disoriented fleet of rogue jodoon attempting to ransack some humans in a dimly-lit alley, and he shoots them down more on a reflex than anything else.

  
the humans look at him, dazed, and jack automatically grins.

  
sometime next week, they send for him after a strange-looking craft lands on the town square. jack, having nothing else to do, picks up his gun and deals with what seem to be sontaran refugees. when he comes back with a bloody nose and a sizzling gun, and the aircraft disappears amongst the stars, the people of cardiff clap and whoop.

  
from then on, it becomes an unspoken rule, a secret helpline, that whenever something odd or not-quite-of-this-earth happens, they'd call for jack harkness, that strange, timeless, foreign man who always wanders through the town a bit lost and unfazed. nobody knows where he came from, nobody knows where he's learned all those things, nobody remembers him ever changing, a lot of them remember his face throuh an a drunkness-induced blur. but they know that for some reason, this man who can't fit in will come when called.

  
he never leaves the town, though. when they come looking for him from london, or even from across the pond, he stubbornly clings to the strange device on his forearm. i'm waiting for my doctor, he always says. they exchange strange looks.

  
.

  
day twenty-four thousand eight hundred thirty two

  
(or, the day jack harkness became a hero)

  
jack has been through a world war before, that dazed and horrible curtain of smoke. that's where the doctor found him, hiding from gunshots and relieving innocent hitchhikers of their money and posessions. but this time when the war comes, he holds on to his gun even before all the heads turn towards him. perhaps it wasn't the belonging, but the abandonment in the end that's taught him some guts.

  
when the war is over the other soldiers stubbornly claim that they've seen captain jack harkness shot, bombed down, fall to his death, be ran over and hit by a grenade, but when years after the war ends he's sitting on his perpetual spot by the counter chatting up a group od soldiers, it becomes quiet common knowledge that this is a man time can't touch.

  
many stare at him in awe, but jack is touched more by those who stare in pity.

  
.

  
day twenty-six thousand nine hundered ninety one

  
(or, how the torchwood institute that dug the heart out of the doctor found jack)

  
by nineteen twenty five, the mouldy room he's first hanged his gun in becomes an office, he has two apprentices, and they have an affilation – torchwood, an odd and old word he's heard out of the doctor's mouth a long ago. everyone knows that captain jack's waiting for something, no one's really sure what a man like that has to look forward to. his lovers, even the ones he stays with for a while, age and die, and jack keeps on smiling smiles that have a bit too much teeth to be convincing.

  
everybody likes jack, but he doesn't think that anybody's ever loved him, not really. that's the price of cheap heroism, being a washed-out poor copy of the doctor. jack's methods are somethimes things that'd churn even the doctor's gut, and the people he fights for aren't always the good ones. but he likes to think that it's at least a bit of a redemption. he stays in this place place that crawls with the ghosts of him, hoping to catch a glimpse of the doctor when he comes.

  
they say that they sometimes see him sticking around one and the same spot on the town square, that one single place that feels out of time and space where the tardis had been parked. they say that he smiles, that he waits for someone to return.

  
out of all the people who never loved jack, in his head, the doctor comes the closest, because he believed a little in second chances.

  
(but maybe, despite all the efforts, this isn't something the doctor would be proud of at all. the doctor jack knew always valued cowardice over insensitiveness, and perhaps over time, jack has replaced one with the other.)

  
.

  
day fifty-three thousand seven hundred and fifty-four

  
(or, copies and other pipedreams)

  
one day, he stumbles upon the doctor, but it's not the version he had been looking for.  
this doctor is younger, with curled brown hair, baroque clothing, sits in the bar with a young man and woman, nourishing a cup of yellow liquid in one hand and laughing loudly, sharply, in a way that his doctor never laughed. this is the doctor in the past, he realizes, the doctor before jack's known him, before the war that changed him, even.

  
he does not know jack, yet. he could introduce himself, he thinks. he could buy him a drink and talk a lot and smile really widely, begin all over, never tell him who he is, stay. the doctor and the woman notice him staring, the doctor winks at him. it'd be so easy to cross over. nothing is ever going to be that easy, jack is sure.

  
in the end he smiles and does not, because he can't imagine this doctor being quite his doctor. the doctor's told him and rose of his past, of how he hadn't always been brave. and if the doctor was imperfect, everything would cave in, he is certain. he imagines that it would be something like when his doctor meet that young, selfish, conman version of jack.

  
he doesn't think he could stand being the knowing one. doesn't think he could be brave enough to follow the doctor through the time war and see how he's forged into the man that he is now.

  
he storms out of the bar, fists balled at the sides, and strides away quickly before he changes his mind.

  
.

  
day fifty four thousand three hundred and two

  
(or, tyler, rose, who doesn't know her serendipious fate yet)

  
in the first years of the twentiest century, it takes all the impulse control in the world not to storm to london and find rose, find something he knows, make sure she's real and then they could cry together.   
not really, though. this rose doesn't know him yet. foolish.

  
he could meet her though, linger, stay at her side until the doctor shows up and then somehow cheat fate, somehow elbow his way into the tardis with them, prevent them from meeting that young version of him.

later, he realizes that if he does that, he will never have met them in the first place. you cannot cheat time. ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

  
sometimes, late at night, he's furiously envious of rose. if it had been her, rendered immortal and messed up in the head, deep inside he's sure that the doctor would never leave her, that he would break time to fix her, even.

  
but still, in two thousand and six, as he reads the report on the battle of canary wharf and he finds her name on the list of dead, he sinks to the floor and cries his eyes out.

  
.

  
day fifty-four thousand seven hundred fifty-eight

  
(or, of team torchwood and other disasters.)

  
jack sinks into the shadows. people on the streets of cardiff no longer turn to stare (quick, quick, look, that's the captain,) and jack's no longer a war hero or the man who fought the daleks, he's no longer the doctor's companion, and after the battle of canary wharf and who died in it, he's not sure he wants to be torchwood anymore either.

  
what would the doctor do? that's the deal, you see, that's the whole freakin point. jack has no idea what the doctor would do, because if you searched the whole wide universe you probably couldn't find anyone worse to keep the doctor's legacy alive. this ever-living, ever-rebooting soldier.

  
the doctor's never liked soldiers.

  
jack sinks into shadows deeper still. even this fake name of his is forgotten. but on the verge of death, torchwood's been given down to him. so he severs all ties with london, and begins to build the thing anew, bit by bit. toshiko sato, the quiet woman with her cold alien devices, owen harper, the doctor who doesn't kniw how to save people, ianto jones the tea boy full of secrets, and brilliant, mad gwen cooper.

  
maybe torchwood three's a lucky number. i'm captain jack harkness and i save people, he steals the words out of the doctor's mouth.

  
but just until the doctor comes, this part goes unspoken.

  
.

  
day fifty-five thousand

  
(or, the skeletons in the closet)

  
the worst part is that he likes them.  
they run around cardiff, the five of them, fighting for this tiny world of theirs. the doctor keeps on being stubbornly absent, and jack begins to think that maybe this is his punishment, stranded on this speck of a planet doing charity. it's a destructive mindset, but it makes more sense than the doctor choosing not to come back for him on purpose.

  
he doesn't like to think about that one.

  
…

  
the doctor wouldn't – doesn't – see it as a punishment. he sees it as his redemption. perhaps that's why the doctor's the doctor and jack is jack, walking on with bullets wedged in his back.

  
he meets another immortal later, lady me, and she tells him of how she's cursed to forget, to live only on scraps of what she's written down. she's not stuck here – she could die if she wanted to. they chuckle between themselves, the private, shared joke of the ancients. she had been left behind by the doctor too. she isn't chasing after him, unlike jack. she doesn't remember, doesn't want to, this dazzling savior of worlds who misplaces the people who care for him.

  
when she's gone, he thinks that she might be better off. sometimes, jack thinks that he might give anything to forget. when wars end, when lovers leave, what's left is always rememberance. jack remembers everything, every day, every death.

  
and he waits.

  
he waits because that's all he's ever been doing.

  
.

  
day fifty-five thousand one hundred eighty-one

  
(or, what would the doctor do)

  
and so it comes that on the day the torchwood three fails, and time starts seeping through the rift and wrecking havoc and the doctor doesn't come, captain jack harkness stands into the shadow of the destroyer of worlds.

  
there are a lot of things jack is: a liar, a cheater, vain and by the doctor's definition he's still a coward. to the doctor, the ones with the guns are always cowards. he thinks of gwen and ianto and owen and tosh, of how he's never told them where he came from or his real name or who he's looking for, never showed them the photographs or the unanswered letters, or the one scar on his body that's never healed, the place where the dalek had shot him.

  
he stands into the shadow, and waits for the life to be sucked out of him. jack has had more life than anythig living around here, and yet he's spent all of it thinking he's owed something.

  
maybe this is his one act of bravery. by the doctor's phylosophy, you are what you are in extremis, and if there are worse extremis than smiling in the face of death jack does not know of them.

  
.

  
day fifty-five thousand one hundred eighty-six

  
(…)

  
even death itself cannot empty jack harkness.

  
he's not sure if that's a consolation or a disaster.

  
gwen sits with her knees pulled tight to her chest, alone in the corner of the room where he's been dead. she had been very brave too – jack could never find it in himself to stay by deathbeds.

  
we'd miss you, she says. if you'd gone.

  
you'd better, they chuckle like something's funny.

it's a stupid thing to say to most people you've worked with for years, i'd miss you. it comes expected that people should at least pretend to notice the absence of you, the empty space you lurked in. but this strikes jack immensely, that they mourned him. he was alien to them, the person who regulated the rules of time, the man who asked for trust but gave no answers.

  
can you miss people like that? this time he laughs at himself. yes, yes you can.

  
she turns to him before she dusts off her trousers and leaves. we all saw the people we lost. whom could the rift possibly show you? what could've tempted you?

  
he smiles softly; the right kind of doctor.

  
but the rift didn't want to show him the doctor, even. it didn't show him anything at all. perhaps, he thinks, you have to be loved back to recieve anything at all.

  
.

  
day fifty-five thousand one hundred eighty-six

(approximately seventeen seconds later)

  
(or, the day the doctor stopped not coming)

  
a loud noise startles jack from his sleep; seventeen alarms jump to life, whirring an erratic tune, and lights flash through the room like ten thousand red alerts. a smile spills across jack's lips as he picks up his coat and leaves the room, leaves forever.  
the tardis is parked in the bay, at exactly the same place as the last time. the whirring sound he hadn't heard in so long booms through the air and this time, he manages to hold on to it before it dematerializes into the vortex carrying him along.

  
jack's had many deaths, but this one is by far the sweetest.

  
.

  
day one

  
(as we begin anew)

  
when he slips back into life, the doctor is staring down at him with a face of mild disappointment. it's a new face, younger and a bit kinder, with large darting eyes. the doctor gives him just the tiniest of smiles, sad and a bit disappointed at the corners. it's a you shouldn't have done that/you know i had to try smile. that's okay. jack hadn't expected to be welcomed warmly, but he wasn't prepared for the sting of it.

  
he knows it now, why he is the way he is, how rose tyler consumed the vortex and breathed life into him and how that life will never run out, and suddenly he feels awful for being envious of her on those late nights on earth.

the doctor tells him, quietly as if he's ashamed of it, how jack is now a fixed point in time, an anomaly, an abomination, and exactly how far the tardis was prepared to go to shake him off: to the end of the world.

  
but when the penny drops, the doctor hugs him, and jack wonders if the absence of him had been noted at least a little. when they're attacked and jack pulls out his gun, he's hoping vain hopes again, because smiling and shooting is what jack harkness does, and if he does it well enough, perhaps the doctor will let him stay.

  
.

  
the doctor smiles and jokes with him, but when jack mentions torchwood his face folds into a grimace.   
i have been there, jack almost says, on all the days you haven't.

  
.

  
and when the end of the world comes and jack is chained alone on the valiant, just a room away from where the doctor is attempting to talk sense into the monster whose fault it all is, jack's thoughts venture to his team that he's left behind with no explanation, to how gwen has sat by his body for five days, to how ianto kissed him before he left, like he was a real person, to how alive they all were, how real. he wonders where they are now, if any of them are still alive, thinks about how he left them to face this alone, about how if any of them are still alive, he scarcely doubts they miss him

  
.

  
when it's all over, the doctor, martha and him stand at the cardiff bay, leaning on the fence and staring into the distance.

everything is reversed and only the three of them remember, and jack thinks about how this is something he'll never be able to forget, the way the earth burned, the way the doctor's face looked when that monster of his died.

  
the doctor turns to him, his eyes crinkle. come with me, he says in the end. laws of time be damned.

  
and any day for the past one hundred and fifty years, jack would've. he would've without a single thought, just as easily as he had ran out of that room on the day the alarms rang. but he had imagined, over the past year, one hundred thousand times over ianto and gwen and owen and tosh alone and abandoned and dead and missing him still.

  
he could go with the doctor, he thinks. he could hop into the tardis and talk a lot and smile really widely, begin all over, never have to die again, stay. the doctor and martha notice him hesistate, the doctor smiles understandingly. it'd be so easy to go with the doctor. nothing is ever going to be that easy, jack is sure.

  
but he finds it in himself that he cannot. the doctor smiles widely, for the first time in forever looks at him with approval. perhaps this is what he considers bravery, jack thinks, staying when you'd rather leave.  
he leaves the bay quickly, fists balled at the sides, and strides away quickly before he changes his mind.

  
.

  
years later, after his team is dead and scattered and after ianto dies in his arms on the floor of an empty office room, he's sitting in a bar nursing a glass of hard liquor that won't help him forget, and across the room his eyes meet with the doctor's.

  
the doctor nods, gives him a little sad smile nothing like the ones he's used to. jack waves at him, remembers the day in the bay that's now blown up and burnt, when he left him for the people who left him, smiles.

  
.

  
in the time that follows, he wonders what would happen if the doctor came for him now, in the silent and dark vastness of space, after all the good people have died. he imagines they could be happy, knows it would be nothing of the sort. the doctor never comes, but back again in this small office in cardiff, it's still his favorite fantasy.

 


End file.
